Reading Bach's Ideas Part IV
Published: 2007 Author: Jonathan Leathwood
IV
The Reader-Player
i Sonority
Sonority is really the principal issue in this prelude, and for a simple reason: the richest sonorities are all imaginary. A guitarist searching for the best fingering of the upper line is soon led to wonder, should notes belonging to the same harmony be allowed to ring together? Should the implication of different voices in the upper line be made explicit? At first this seems a simple enough question, and yet when we try to make a faithful harmonic realisation, we discover that the figuration implies far more than a progression of simple triads, but rather a series of suspensions (example 26):
Example 26
BWV 998, Prelude, opening measures
Such a richly expressive texture defies realisation on the guitar, but in any case its literal rendering is obviously not Bach’s intention. Everything is left to the miracle of the inner ear. The task of the performer is to hear inwardly the sustained part-writing, shimmering with dissonances, and to allow the music to breathe with it. To imagine sustained parts to this degree is an essential part of self-training—without it we must needs give up the guitar and take up the organ instead. Besides, anyone who has fought against the difficulties of performing in an over-dry hall will know that an ‘inner acoustic’ can be as sumptuous as the most flattering resonance.
We should not quit example 26 without noting that in it, the bass is now notated long. For as we saw in part II, Bach sustains a pedal bass when it is underpinning a multi-voiced texture. Now we can turn the point on its head: the fact that Bach notates the bass to be played short should give us some indication that the treble voice cannot bear much of a polyphonic rendering (that is to say, much over-ringing of notes). We are reminded of the French lutenists’ style brisé, in which inner voices are casual passers-by, dropping in and out the texture; but to apply this term to Bach’s trademark, multi-voiced voices, as is often done with this prelude, is probably mistaken. On the other hand, an interesting experiment is to finger the piece as if to allow the harmonies and their dissonances to ring, but to keep the texture dry, with a minimum of overlapping sound, sometimes lifting left-hand fingers, sometimes replacing right-hand fingers. Such a fingering, clearly, does not set out to maintain a consistent tone colour throughout repetitions of motivic cells, but it may be the most suggestive one as far as the inner ear is concerned.[19]
ii Balance of voices
In section III above, I described this prelude as a ‘modulating, expanding passacaglia’—as it turned out, provisionally. For in the next section it became something else: a series of attempts to repeat a two-voice framework, more or lesrs literally. Of course, in almost every case the ground bass is fundamental—fixed from one stanza to the next—and it is the treble which must invent new counterpoints in response to the changing tonality and modality. The single exception, the one which disproved the first rule and established the second, is the bass C sharp in m. 29 (this was considered in example 16). Just this one note is enough to show that the bass line is not immutable: rather the two voices behave as a harmonic aggregate, so that Bach may vary either so long as the harmonic sense remains clear. Nevertheless, the bass is privileged. If it is not quite true to say that the bass carries the theme and the treble the counterpoint, nor is it entirely false.
How then to find the right balance of sound between the two voices? It is already a technical challenge to play the bass as strongly as the treble. But even this is not enough, for in an equal-voiced two-part texture, the listener’s attention is all the same more attracted to the upper line (according to my observations, at least). To draw the listener’s attention actively to the bass requires the balance to be shifted subtly in its favour, and the necessary independence of the thumb must be harnessed.
The most characteristic difficulty is posed by mm. 19–23, when the bass line voices an augmentation of mm. 11–14. Is there anything to be done about this in performance? Nothing too ingenious, at any rate: to apply for example the same dynamic shading to the bass line in either passage, one moving twice as slowly as the other, seems rather manipulative. In fact, it might even be that the bass is not to be shaped with much dynamic expression. Rather it must have something of the weight and direct simplicity of a chorale, so that the augmentation speaks clearly, more fact than effect.
And so back to Bach’s rests. For to make the bass sound independently in passages such as these, the rests prove their worth. Perhaps if Bach’s time had known the articulation marking so favoured by Debussy, the weighted staccato (line-and-dot), we would find the bass line thus marked throughout. We have already seen in part II that the very difficulty of some of Bach’s rests can be of help in hewing out the texture: in this prelude, equally, the bass notes gain from the extreme definition the rests give them. This is true even from the opening bars. When the rests are observed strictly, the bass is straight away a separate character, something active and more than a cushion of sound for the treble. By the same token, only when the bass is played with some degree of fullness does the definition of the rests come to life. Thus these rests are the key to the balance of the texture called forth by analysis. All this, of course, is more or less as described by Bach’s second son, Philipp Emanuel, in his advice to keyboard players:
Notes which are neither detached, connected, nor fully held are sounded for half [in the case of BWV 998, it is evidently two thirds] their value, unless the abbreviation Ten. (Held) is written over them, in which case they must be held fully. Crotchets and quavers in moderate and slow tempos are usually performed in this semidetached manner. They must not be played weakly, but with fire and a slight accentuation.[20]
‘...With fire’! If the rests in the bass are tantamount to articulation marks, even expression marks, it is interesting to speculate that the top voice might not be undermarked. There are only four slur markings in the autograph (mm. 9, 10, 40 and 48). Perhaps then a consistent legato from beginning to end is open to question.
iii Interpretation
How much basis for an interpretation have we found in all of this? This is the question which few professional analysts like to be asked—the performers among them included. In this case, I have attempted to avoid analysis in its primary sense of interpretation and reception, and sought instead to present some snapshots of the composer at his workbench: a human figure facing decisions without which this prelude could not have been written in the way it has. After all, isn’t it commonly said that a successful performance is not repetition but recreation? What happens, then, if we try to translate such sentiments into skills? There can be little doubt that what has been so painstakingly described above was for Bach, by now with a good forty years of composing behind him,[21] a series of quick, unreflecting steps or intuitive leaps—in a word, ‘improvisation’. Witness the following description of Bach, related by his son Philipp Emanuel in a letter to Bach’s biographer Forkel:
When he listened to a rich and many-voiced fugue, he could soon say, after the first entries of the subjects, what contrapuntal devices it would be possible to apply, and which of them the composer by rights ought to apply, and on such occasions, when I was standing next to him, and he had voiced his surmises to me, he would joyfully nudge me when his expectations were fulfilled.[22]
In this perspective, the material amassed in the examples above cannot quite be assigned to the ‘preinterpretive’ stage of learning. For it is not enough to research and notate the various compositional possibilities, only to forget them once the interpretation has been formed. The skill we are speaking of, surely, is not experienced through pen and ink—it is felt in the fingers.
The guitarist who plays by rote, able only to start at the beginning and to play through, and the guitarist who brings the background to life, improvising variant after variant in real time, have something essential in common: what they know, they know by ‘feel’. Of course, this latter player, a kind of master in his or her way, did not grow ready-made out of the former. This article enacts an intermediary stage: Bach’s flashes of insight are here calculated step by step. For the rote player, the departure from the purely tactile realm, a minor Eden in the journey towards mastery, may be painful and slow: the intellect must learn to direct the fingers and a bewildering number of variants have all to be played and committed to memory. Nevertheless, to play the analysis is crucial: after many experiments there is the real chance that this work might become a kind of reflex in which the mind, always so slow, is ready to give up its conscious role. At this point, when all distinction of thought and feeling has been melted down, the tactile immediacy felt by the beginner is restored, and mastery is not knowledge but sensation. Such a player, we might add, long ago forgot the difference between playing and reading.
Notes
- My thanks to Ricardo Iznaola for this suggestion. [back]
- Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Versuch über die wahre Art, das Clavier zu spielen (Berlin, 1753 and 1762); fac. repr. ed. L. Hoffmann-Erbrecht (Leipzig, n.d.); trans. W.J. Mitchell as Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (London, 1949), p 157. [back]
- Christoph Wolff, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London, 1980), dates BWV 998 within the last ten years of Bach’s life. [back]
- The Bach Reader (op. cit.), p 277. [back]
I must thank Philip Weller (University of Nottingham), Ricardo Iznaola (University of Denver), Antonia Banducci (University of Denver), Steven Waechter (University of Northern Colorado) and the composer Bayan Northcott, who devoted much time to reading drafts of this paper and suggested important revisions.
First published in EGTA Guitar Journal (2000), pp 14–32
©2000 Jonathan Leathwood